America stands poised at the edge of a precipice; her next step could send her plummeting headlong to an untimely death. Yet, to even suggest such a possibility opens the door to charges of alarmism or hyperbolic fear-mongering. The chattering classes preach that a dictatorship can’t happen here; America will survive even with one-party rule and a radical socialist in the White House. The radio talk-show host, whose persistent pipes of “Let not your heart be troubled,” has done little to allay my fears for what is likely to happen to my country if the Democrats gain a super majority in Congress and Barack Obama wins the presidency.

It seems that conservative and libertarian pundits and commentators have not connected the dots to see the picture that I see, for they would be sounding the alarm and warning Americans of the radicalism that is about to bring down their nation. Then again, perhaps some have captured the image through their rose-colored glasses but are so attached to their celebrity status that they dare not point it out for fear of being ostracized and labeled a “kook” by their more “sensible” colleagues.

Call me a kook and detest me, but name-calling and rejection will not stop this watchman from warning our fence-sitting Americans of what lurks over the horizon. Facts are stubborn things; they are not opinions subject to debate, and for that reason, two plus two always equal four, not five, contrary to the slogans in Stalin’s Soviet Union or the announcements from the Party of Big Brother in George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell’s protagonist, Winston Smith, who works in the media and creates the Party’s deceptive propaganda, doesn’t know for sure if two plus two equal five, as the Party claims, “If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then?”

Here we stand a divided country on the brink of entering a nightmare world, unprecedented in American politics, with an undecided electorate who are unsure for whom they will vote in this election. They see Tweedle Dee, Tweedle Dum, six of one, half-dozen of the other, without a dime’s difference between them. Like Winston Smith, they don’t know if two plus two equal four or two and two make five.

Unlike Smith, our undecideds don’t live in an Orwellian society under a totalitarian government, at least not yet, so why don’t they know a radical socialist when they see one? Perhaps they can’t distinguish a radical socialist from a moderate conservative because they have absorbed so much conflicting information from the media making it impossible to sort out.

Conservative pundits and commentators have made a critical error in judgment by depicting Obama as the most liberal member of the Senate. Obama is anything but liberal; he is a radical socialist ideologue whose worldview and personality traits align him more with the revolutionary demagogues Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez than they do George McGovern and Jimmy Carter. This is why Castro writes in a column that Obama is “the most progressive candidate for the U.S. presidency.”

Add the word progressive to the word Democrat and you get activists demanding a socialist agenda; i.e., massive income redistribution from corporations and the wealthy to low income workers and the poor; massive reductions in military spending; an increase in social welfare spending; universal healthcare; living wage laws; the right of all workers to organize into labor unions and to engage in strikes and collective bargaining; the abolition of significant portions of the Patriot Act; the legalization of gay marriage; strict campaign finance reform laws; a complete pullout from the war in Iraq; a crackdown on free trade and corporate welfare; and the Freedom of Choice Act, which would cancel every state, federal, and local regulation on abortion, abolish all state restrictions on government funding for abortions, and if Obama is elected, use income taxes to fund abortions.

In other words, you get the issues and causes championed by both the House Progressive Caucus (HPC), which is now the single largest partisan caucus in the United States House of Representatives, and the country’s most radical socialist presidential candidate. HPC, a group made up of the most radical social democrats in Congress, is involved in symbiotic relationship with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which is the largest socialist organization in the United States.is the principal affiliate of the Socialist International, which claims to be the successor to Karl Marx’s “First International,” founded in London in 1864.

During his commencement address at Harvard, Solzhenitsyn said, “socialism of any type and shade leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death.” Eric Hoffer correctly analyzed that socialist movements attract the misfits who are dissatisfied with themselves and their lives, who blame their own condition on outside forces, and think that a change in the world around them will suddenly transform their identities and magically cure their problems. The people caught up in socialist movements are searching for meaning in their lives; therefore, they often hate the present and passionately seek a perfect tomorrow.

Hoffer understood that America had a vigorous and healthy society because of the quality of its common people. Until recently, most Americans have been comfortable in their own skin and satisfied with their own lives, which explains why they have not been mesmerized by socialist movements such as Nazism, fascism, and communism. But now, far too many Americans are mesmerized by Obama’s words and image, not for what he’s accomplished, but for what they hope he will become.

Never before has a politician had such a captivating effect on so many Americans. Such a grandiose claim “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for” by the charismatic leader of change about himself and the ruling clique of radical socialists in Congress is reason enough to give pause. Mark Levin says his greatest concern is whether the majority of voters will prove “susceptible to the appeal of a charismatic demagogue.”

It’s regrettable when any nation’s people surrender their hearts and minds over to a despot; but when the electorate of the freest people in the greatest nation on earth do it, “[t]his prospect frightens me much more than bombs.” What happened in Germany with Hitler, happened again in Cuba with Castro, and can happen here in the United States with Obama. It was the ordinary people who carried out the leader’s heinous crimes and murders believing in the glorious tomorrow promised them. “Of all tyrannies,” writes C.S. Lewis, “a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.”

The Germans had enormous war debts and a terrible economy, so they believed the charismatic leader who personified hope and went on to elect the National Socialist Workers Party (Nazis) that promised change. The Cubans also supported a young, charismatic leader who promised change, and they openly embraced his idea without asking what kind of change or knowing the price they would have to pay. The upshot for our undecided electorate to ponder is that freedom is not free and “is never more than one generation away from extinction.”